Bacteria becoming more resistant with overuse of antibiotics

Friday

Dec 6, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Knowing the difference between bacteria and viruses could help save lives.

Knowing the difference between bacteria and viruses could help save lives.

"I have seen patients in the hospital who have a fever," said Dr. Waleed Albert, an infectious disease specialist at Faxton St. Luke's Healthcare. "They have all the signs of infection and they use the words virus and bacteria interchangeably. They think an antibiotic will treat both."

It won't. Antibiotics don't kill viruses. But taking them when they're not needed — or taking them incorrectly – contributes to a potentially deadly problem: antibiotic resistance.

Certain strains of bacteria don't respond to one or more types of antibiotics, making infections harder to treat and raising the specter of a future filled with untreatable superbugs.

"It's almost a gloom and doom scenario," Albert said "You have increased antibiotic resistance to the old antibiotics, but I don't have any new antibiotics to work against the new bacteria that are emerging."

The issue has gotten a lot of attention internationally this year. The World Health Organization's World Health Assembly conducted an event on the issue in May. The World Economics Forum included a section on it in its Global Risks 2013 report, calling antibiotic resistance "the greatest risk of hubris to human health."

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recent report listing threat levels for different germs and an action plan for combating antibiotic resistance.

More than 2 million Americans become infected with resistant bacteria every year and at least 23,000 of them die, according to the CDC report.

It's an issue local hospitals wrestle with every day as they try to treat infections and prevent new ones. They stepped up their prevention efforts this year by buying new equipment – an ultraviolet disinfection system for Faxton St. Luke's and a surface monitoring system for St. Elizabeth Medical Center.

"Every day we have patients here in the medical center who have some kind of an antibiotic resistant or multiple-drug resistant infection," said Heidi Coluzza, director of infection prevention at St. Elizabeth Medical Center.

Some of those patients become infected in the hospital, but many do not.

"We have a bigger problem with the community-acquired cases than we do with hospital-acquired cases," she said. "In fact, our hospital-associated rate has been decreasing rapidly."

Local hospitals stepped up their infection control efforts against all germs years ago, but have put special procedures in place to handle resistant bacteria. These include new cleaning procedures and technology, screening patients, isolating certain patients and lots of good, old-fashioned hand washing.

But hospitals are just one venue for battling antibiotic resistance, according to the CDC report. The report outlines a multi-pronged approach including infection prevention, infection tracking and smarter prescribing in health care facilities, not just hospitals, and in the community.

"I think attention is growing and growing," said Heather Bernard, infection control manager at Faxton St. Luke's. "I think people are starting to get more aware of antibiotic prescribing ways, but we have a long way to go. If it's going to be a team effort, everybody has to have a piece of it. I also think that we need to be able to develop antibiotics to be able to treat them."

For their part, doctors are changing their prescribing habits. Don't expect an antibiotic prescription for every sniffle and earache. Even some illnesses caused by bacteria will clear up on their own in a few days.

"People think not just twice, but three times before they prescribe antibiotics," Albert said.